Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/72

 48 sex to find male substitutes, the same privilege being extended to old men, infirm persons, and monks.

Ivan IV.'s Code was to provide for a similar equalization of the combatants' strength. But at that moment the judicial combat was beginning to change its nature. It had long been looked on as a merely human expedient, held in scant respect, and ranking lower than confession and testimony among the means available for demonstrating the truth. As a mark of distrust and scorn, the oath and the casting of lots were added to it. Before proceeding to the combat the oath was taken, and the oath was deferred till after the casting of lots. The idea of Divine intervention did not present itself save in a latent condition; but now it began to rear its head and gather strength. The judicial combat was taking on the form of a Divine judgment.

In this fact some people will recognise another instance of Russia's reversed march in the path of progress; it will be recollected, in any case, that the ordalie proscribed in France by the edict of Louis le Débonnaire, in 829, was forbidden, and forbidden afresh by the French Parliament in 1400. And, indeed, this ordalie was not quite the same thing. It essentially depended on the idea of a celestial arbitrament, which was not associated with such encounters, in Russia, till a late period. It was a mere legacy, in her case, of a barbarous past, when each man did justice for himself, and when the decision of every quarrel depended on the personal valour of the disputants. Thus, far from favouring its maintenance and application as she favoured the various appeals to the Divine judgment in other places, the Church, even while labouring to endue the custom with a religious meaning, opposed its practice. She succeeded by this means in withdrawing its two accessories—the oath and the casting of lots—which were finally made independent forms of proof. At a fairly early date, this last was currently employed in ecclesiastical business. The sentence was drawn like a lottery-ticket. Before the common law tribunals similar judicial methods were pursued, down to the close of the sixteenth century, according to a procedure of which Henry Lane, an English commercial agent, gives a curious account in connection with a lawsuit in which he was interested, in the year 1560.

It was connected with a sum of 600 roubles claimed from him by a Kostroma merchant. The matter was to have been decided, in the first instance, by a single combat, for the purposes of which Lane had provided himself with a redoubtable champion in the person of a fellow-countryman of his own, employed, like himself, by the English trading company settled in Russia. This man, whose name was Romanus Best, was